Intel Core i5-3427U: Ivy Bridge For Ultrabooks

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Rendering and Media Encoding: Cinebench and LAME MT

Cinebench R11.5 is a 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput.

Cinebench R11.5

3D Rendering on The CPU and IGP

This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral "No Keyframes" animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.

In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to the MP3 format, which is a popular scenario that many end users work with on a day-to-day basis to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. LAME is an open-source mid to high bit-rate and VBR (variable bit rate) MP3 audio encoder that is used widely around the world in a multitude of third party applications. In this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file and convert it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME MT application in single and multi-thread modes. Processing times are recorded below, listed in seconds. Shorter times equate to better performance.

In Lame we see a similar spread of performance with the low power Core i5-3427U sliding in just under the standard voltage Core i5-2520M Sandy Bridge dual core. The new Ivy Bridge Ultra chip is only about 10-12% behind the full power Sandy Bridge dual-core, however, and AMD's Trinity APU isn't even in the running, quite frankly.